I came up on an interesting app on Engadget. The app is still being tested BUT it is able to translate Japanese to English with 80-90% accuracy. I think this is relevant news to translation projects that in the works or will be started. A Rom hacker can, with the use of this app, essentially do the job by himself or with minimal help. I hope this message is read by some of the willing Rom hackers as it seems just about every gamer likes to see Japanese only games become playable in the English language. The carrier started testing the service with 400 users today, and hopes to make it available to all subscribers in the second half of 2012.

Prowler of course I read the article and I watched the video, thank you. Prowler you would use the phone like this; Just place the phone next to the DS's speaker during spoken dialogue and ta da you would have a translation of the spoken dialogue. Games with written dialogue would, of course, still need a team of multiple members.

It cannot understand the nuances of meaning behind text. Humans can't even get translation right, because the depth and worlds we shade with the meaning of words is not something which occurs at the surface of letters and symbols.

Any attempt to machine translate should never be an ally to a translator. These tools are useful for navigating in a place whose language you're not familiar with. Navigating and understanding are not the same thing.

It's obviously not useful for rom hackers, but it is some amazing improvement.

The translations on the video were pretty accurate, using correct subject-object-verb relation instead of the English (subject-verb-object) relation.
I don't know how the nuances (mostly puns) would get translated, as I've never tested this.

@purplesludge you would be surprised- I can think of examples on both sides of things (I have seen games that are little more than text files and some games that quite literally use text files and I have seen games that almost exclusively use functional text "press A to jump, press B to run.....") but in general no one area is considered harder.

Anyhow unless they magicked up a human level AI (in which case what the hell people- you have solved several major problems in computing and probably will get a few laws of physics named after you and you are using it for this?) the only thing I would dare to throw this at (beyond the slightly advanced dictionary stage machines get used for now) is the spoof/samurai pizza cats (the game engine and maps are used but a nearly totally different story is told) style of thing and frankly I do not think I have ever seen a samurai pizza cats style of hack (loads of spoofs, loads of improvements, loads of very loose translations and loads of total conversions but never that).

My favourite example of fun things here is "the pen in the box, the box is in the pen" or if you prefer your mathematics I would point you at the problem of 99% accuracy and false positives (recently finding favour when tied to security issues like a scanner).

its really difficult to have an accurate translation. what google,stars21 and others are doing is just amazing. its gonna be difficult but definitely plausible for quick translations after which revisions and editing can be done.

Another thing to keep in mind is in games with text only. A rom hacker can take on a team member who can read the lines using this application and ta da..Translated Text! With this method the team members don't have to speak English/Japanese (what have you) and still progress to the final goal.